I am not a feral shopper, a pack rat ripping through the carrion at Best Buy on Black Friday or maniacally pounding a keyboard on Cyber Monday. I like to take the holidays calmly…and slowly. I would gladly become a standard bearer for a Slow Christmas Movement.

I can do this in Europe thanks to a glass of hot mulled wine or chocolate, a juicy sausage, a gingerbread cookie huddled next to a firepit at a Christmas Market.

It is not easy to be chirpy at 3 o’clock in the morning unless you’re a mockingbird or a Swede during Midsummer when the sun hardly sets at all. Swedes are not normally a chirpy bunch, but they do manage to stay awake on summer nights.

Why are dangerous things so beautiful. Frogs, for example. The most poisonous ones are the most colorful. That could go for women too, but I am not going there.

Some of the most striking scenes on earth are formed by cataclysmic events. I spent a few days climbing the hills and walking the paths of the Greek island of Santorini, formed by one of the largest volcanic eruptions since humans put chisel to rock.

As a Monty Python fan, London in my minds eye is a city of silly walks: eccentric lopes, tortured tangos and Teutonic goose steps. It is really quite opposite that, in fact. That’s why the Pythons were funny. Last week in London, Pat and I settled into an apartment off Fleet Street and toured old London by foot.

Where are the poets of yesteryear, the bards of epic verse, the drunkards and the rakes whose words spurred torrid love and sent armies off to battle? Their ghosts live on the shores of Lake Garda, Italy.